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my 21 month old screams and cries every night when i put her to bed. She has tantrums in her crib..what do I do? Please respond if you have some good advice. It kills me to hear her ..

That is so hard! My 5 year old did it off and on at that age and one of my 2 year old twins does it off and on. What kind of bedtime routine do you have? I have found that if we do the same thing everynight they know what is coming and that they are going to bed. This is ours it starts about 1 hour before bed. Pick up toys, pjs, snack, brush teeth, read 1 or 2 books(but no more cause then they always ask for more) bathroom break, then to their room, they hide(a little game we play), we sing 1 song and then hugs kisses and nighty night! They play this hiding game where they hide somewhere in their room and then we find them and put them to bed or we will play airplane into their bed. I think this helps a little cause it just lightens the mood a little. Then when my 2 year old will cry or if he wakes and then start crying I always go to him once make sure he is ok and tell him it is night time and he needs to go to........

sleep. We talk a little then I put him back down to sleep. He will start to cry again and I know there are people that are going to bash me for this but I let him cry. Just the other night he cried for about an hour and a half and I sat up with my heart breaking the whole time. It is hard but it seems to be the only thing that will get my boys to stop. He doesnt do it often just once in a while these days. He was doing it everynight for 2 months(that is when I was always going in his room to try and get him back to sleep). I did this and stuck to my guns and it was over in 3 days. Good luck I really hope you find something that works for you because I know how hard bedtime can be!

My two year old does it all the time. We've gotten to the point we have to lay her down in our bed and after she falls asleep move her over to her bed. If she wakes up she screams bloody murder, sometimes at 3 in the morning. It's a terrible thing.

All I can really say, is to tell the child no.. and go from there. Possibly lay the child down with some cartoons or something on tv, a night light, leave the door open.. something along those lines.

Cosleeping doesn't work for everyone; it never worked for us and we tried it at various stages. In our bed, she'd just toss and turn and no one would sleep. So try that if you want, but I'm guessing if you haven't been cosleeping since the beginning, you go to bed at a different time... My daughter's 2.5 and is having a lot of new fears, anxieties, nightmares. It took about two weeks, but we've worked out a tear-free bedtime system... We do the things we always did (from the time she was about 8 months until a few weeks ago, she went down without a peep and slept through) -- bath, reading, she counts to three when she's "in position" with her animals, songs in the dark, then kiss and hug and parent walks out. But we had to add a couple of new things: she gets to sleep with this little bracelet of mine, and i kiss each one of the beads before I give it to her. Then I promise to sit on the stairs until she's asleep. (cont'd)

(cont'd).. the stairs are right outside her door. I sit there and leave her door propped open just a little. She's allowed to talk to her animals, but not me (of course, I answer her if she calls out to me, but I remind her that I'm there but it's not time for a conversation). It's working. But she's still waking a couple of times most nights and needing us IN the room until she's asleep. We're working on a solution for that...

Well my son did this all the way til big boy bed time. one thing that helped was around the same age I started telling him " max, its bedtime now, you get to sleep with your blue blanket, your puppy, oh oh and your baby and beaver.. then when you wake up, mommy will be here and we can make pancakes when you wake up " as simple as this sounds, it really helped out 75% of nights.. then he would wake up wanting to help make pancakes! lol!! the other times, I just walked in there, had to tell him it was bedtime, mommy loves you, it took sometimes an hour - since he's been in a big boy bed, which I thought wuold be a nightmare, it still takes him up to an hour to fall asleep but he actually stays in bed and talks to himself.. which I NEVER thought he'd do.